{"id":2201,"date":"2001-08-28T14:04:31","date_gmt":"2001-08-28T14:04:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/216.71.127.204\/wordpress\/?p=2201"},"modified":"2015-10-20T18:59:55","modified_gmt":"2015-10-20T18:59:55","slug":"a-conversation-with-bill-kirchen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/houstonmusicreview.com\/wordpress\/2001\/08\/28\/a-conversation-with-bill-kirchen\/","title":{"rendered":"A Conversation with Bill Kirchen"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n\n
Written by James Killen <\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Aug 28, 2013 at 02:04 PM<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\"Image\"I had the good fortune to have Bill Kirchen, former Lost Planet Airman and still reigning King of Dieselbilly, dedicate a few minutes of his time to answer some questions for me before his Thursday night show at the duck. We talked about his music, the people that he\u2019s met and the road in general.<\/p>\n

HMR – Who coined the term \u201cDieselbilly\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n

BK – I did. I needed a term where I had no competition. I mean truck driving music used to be a legitimate genre of country music, but not so much now. So I call it dieselbilly. It was a lot of fun when I was touring with Nick Lowe, because he would introduce me as DEE-sul Billy Kirchen, in his aristocratic British accent.<\/p>\n

HMR – That would have been fun. Nick Lowe\u2019s an interesting character. I\u2019ve always liked his music, even though he seems like the songwriter\u2019s songwriter. <\/strong><\/p>\n

BK – He\u2019s wonderful. He\u2019s a great guy. A great musician, too, a great writer. Good guy, big hearted guy.<\/p>\n

HMR – Do you ever run into any of the Lost Planet Airmen, anymore?<\/strong><\/p>\n

BK – Yeah, sure. I just talked to Buffalo Bruce on the phone. We just played a gig with Bobby Black, the steel player. Buffalo Bruce was the bass player. I haven\u2019t seen Billy C. in a couple of years, although I owe him a phone call. I tried him recently. I used to play one gig a year with the old Commander. I don\u2019t think we\u2019re playing this year, but for a number of years we did in his hometown in Bayshore, Long Island. Andy Stein, I see if I\u2019m in New York. John Tishy, I always stay in touch with. He just stepped down as chair of the Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering Department at Rensselaer Polytech. That\u2019s about it for the Airmen. One guy\u2019s gone, Lance Dickerson\u2019s gone. Everyone else is still kicking around and I\u2019m in touch with them all.<\/p>\n

HMR – And still playing a little bit here and there?<\/strong><\/p>\n

BK – Them or me?<\/p>\n

HMR – I know that you\u2019re playing all the time, it\u2019s more a hobby for the rest of the guys?<\/strong><\/p>\n

BK – Well, George is still a full time musician and so is Andy Stein.<\/p>\n

HMR – How about new up and coming guitar players? Has anybody caught your eye lately?<\/strong><\/p>\n

BK – I was just at Guitar Town Festival in Copper Mountain, Colorado, that\u2019s put on every year. John Jorgenson is there every year. I did it this year and two years ago with this band, with Jack O\u2019Dell, that\u2019s sitting in this room, but being very quiet. There was a guy named Rory (Hoffman) and he\u2019s blind, plays with the guitar on his lap, with it not restrung, but with the headstock pointed to the right. He\u2019s plays it on his lap like Thumbs Carlo(?), except backwards. He was stunning. He was just a stunning guitar player. Apparently I met him before when he played accordion with Carolyn Martin. Carolyn Martin is a singer, she and her husband Dave. Carolyn was in the Time Jumpers, the Nashville based Western Swing band, which has now got Vince Gill and the world\u2019s most famous steel player, Paul Franklin. So Rory is unbelievable, I hope that\u2019s his name. You know, I don\u2019t know about up and coming. I\u2019ve got some secret weapon guys that you don\u2019t hear that much about. My friend, George Bedard, from Ann Arbor, Michigan has put out some records on the Blind Pig label. He\u2019s just a great player. I have played with him in my home town Ann Arbor. There\u2019s the Jerry Miller from the East Coast who plays with Eilan Jewell, who is one of my favorite players. Man that guy, Jerry Miller, he\u2019s great. There\u2019s a bunch of great players.<\/p>\n

HMR – Yeah, there are. As a matter of fact, you\u2019ve just named off a bunch of them that I\u2019ve not heard of and you\u2019re going to send me straight to the internet to look them up.<\/strong><\/p>\n

BK – Then there are the guys that almost everybody knows, like Kenny Vaughan. He\u2019s just great. I love him.<\/p>\n

HMR – I just reviewed your last record. I thought that it was great. It was a lot of fun to go back and revisit a lot of the old songs and get a studio version of that. I really enjoyed the last one on there with Jorma Kaukonen playing acoustic.<\/strong><\/p>\n

BK – \u201cTalking About Chicken\u201d<\/p>\n

HMR – Yeah, that was fun. Did you write that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

BK – Yeah, I wrote that with Sarah Brown and my wife, Louise. Sarah Brown is a bass player from Austin\u2026<\/p>\n

HMR – I\u2019ve seen here, she\u2019s amazing.<\/strong><\/p>\n

BK – She\u2019s great. We were writing songs. I was living in Maryland at the time. We\u2019d written some songs for a couple of the prior albums.\u00a0 She\u2019d flown up to write with us. We\u2019d been writing all day and had written a couple of songs and some not so successful attempts. After about eleven hours, we\u2019re all going to bed and she\u2019s scratching my dog, Rufus. It just so happened that my wife who is a vegetarian had bought us a cooked chicken to eat while we were writing. Sarah was saying \u201cRufus this is your lucky day\u201d while she was scratching Rufus and I said \u201cYeah, he doesn\u2019t usually get chicken.\u201d Sarah says \u201cWell, I was talking about the love\u201d and I said \u201cI was talking about the chicken\u201d, so boom. We were like were you talking about love or were you talking about chicken, and we were off to the races. We wrote the song in about fifteen minutes, laughing hysterically. Then I woke up the next morning and we said can we actually use this? And so it was like absolutely, and I wrote the bridge the next day to tie it all together. And there you go. We got Jorma to play and there it was.<\/p>\n

HMR – It\u2019s a fun song. We were listening to it on the way over here. Well, have you got anything that you want to tell the world?<\/strong><\/p>\n

BK – Well, I\u2019d like to tell them first off, to rock on. I\u2019d say rock on and I\u2019d say don\u2019t be afraid to go out and listen to music and make your own music if you want to. It\u2019s a big, wild world. I like all kinds of stuff. I play a little narrower than my taste include, but not much. I play a pretty wide spectrum, but we love it all. If you come to one of our shows, it\u2019s gonna be fun. I write songs and I\u2019m a singer-songwriter, but we are also rock and rollers and we try not to leave it too precious. We try to have a good time. I wrote, \u201cI Ain\u2019t Never Had Too Much Fun\u201d years ago and that\u2019s on the new album and I still think those are good words to live by.<\/p>\n

HMR – That\u2019s good advice. Our main objective at Houston Music Review is to get people to get up and go out to listen to live music. We\u2019re all amateurs. We don\u2019t make any money at it. We don\u2019t do any advertising. I\u2019m a purchasing agent. Another guy is a lawyer. All that we are trying to do is to get people out and listen to live music.<\/strong><\/p>\n

BK – God bless you for it, too, because with all of the choices for people today, they forget that the only way to catch music coming through the air was to be there. There is something special about making music live as opposed to having all of the ones and zeros coming through the computer speakers. Really, God bless you.<\/p>\n

HMR – Thank you for that. Live music is different and we have to get out there and support those guys that are coming up, or they won\u2019t be there. What if all of the starving artists starved?<\/strong><\/p>\n

BK – OOOOh, ouch. That\u2019s no good. I\u2019m not starving, but I feel lucky that nobody has slapped the guitar out of my hands and made me get a job.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Written by James Killen Aug 28, 2013 at 02:04 PM I had the good fortune to have Bill Kirchen, former Lost Planet Airman and still reigning King of Dieselbilly, dedicate a few minutes of his time to answer some questions for me before his Thursday night show at the duck. We talked about his music,… <\/p>\n

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